Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth (Build It Yourself) covers many concepts in earth science, from paleontology to climate systems to how to make a battery out of apple (how can a kid’s science activity not include the apple battery!). This book represents an interesting concept, because it involves kids in mostly easy to do at home projects, covers numerous scientific concepts, and takes the importance of global climate change as a given. There is a good amount of history of research, though the book does not cover a lot of the most current scientists and their key work (I’d have liked to see a chapter specifically on the Hockey Stick and the paleo record, thought these concepts are included along with the other material).
One of the coolest things about the book is the material on what an individual can do to address energy and climate related problems, including (but not limited to) advice on activism, such as writing letters to government officials.
Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth (Build It Yourself) is listed as for reading ages 9-12 (reading level U), but with a parent working with the kid, this can work for much younger children, especially if you focus on the projects. I intend to work with my five year old on some of the projects, and use a couple of the sections as night time reading material. When he gets a bit older he can read the book himself. This would also be a good book to give as a gift to your kid’s school library, or even better, the appropriate elementary school teacher.
The book also addresses Common Core Standards for literacy in science and technology.
From the Publisher:
How do we know the climate is changing? For more than 200 years, scientists have been observing, measuring, and analyzing information about our planet’s climate. In Climate Change: Discover How It Impacts Spaceship Earth, young readers examine real studies concerning planetary science, Arctic ice bubbles, migratory patterns, and more. Kids explore the history of human impact from the Industrial Revolution to our modern-day technology, as well as the science and engineering innovations underway around the world to address global climate change.
The idea of climate change can be scary, but every one of us has the ability to make a difference. Focused on a pro-active approach to environmental education, Climate Change engages readers through hands-on activities such as building a solar pizza oven, along with deconstructions of myths, hypotheses, and communications. Kids are directed to digital supplemental material that enhances the discussion of climate change and makes complex concepts easier to understand through visual representation. Climate Change offers a way to think of our Spaceship Earth as the singular resource it is.
The projects in the book include:
<li>Make a telescope</li>
<li>Build a solar cooker out of a pizza box</li>
<li>Build a sundial</li>
<li>Make an anemometer</li>
<li>Measure moisture in the air</li>
<li>Perform a transportation energy audit</li>
<li>Write a letter to they mayor</li>
The book is by Erin Twamley and Joshua Sneiderman. Erin is a professional educator and communicator, and Joshua is an experienced science teacher. Mike Crosier is the illustrator.
California voters feel increasingly squeezed by their drought, according to a new USC Donrslife/Los Angeles Times poll.
September 11, 2015 — As one of California’s most severe droughts on record continues to worsen, more than one in three state voters say the drought has had a major impact on them and the lives of their families, according to results from the latest USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times Poll.
Thirty-five percent of California voters said the drought has had a major impact, 50 percent said it has had a minor impact, and 14 percent said it has had no impact at all, according to the poll. That’s an increase since last September, when the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll showed 22 percent said the drought had had a major impact and 28 percent said it had no impact at all.
Overall, 92 percent of voters called the drought a “crisis or major problem,” with just 7 percent saying it was “minor or not a problem,” according to the poll. That’s a slight uptick since last September when the 90 percent of voters said the drought was a “crisis or major problem, according to the poll.
“Last year, Californians thought the drought was a problem for the politicans to handle,” said Dan Schnur, director of the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll and director of the Unruh Institute of Politics of USC. “This year, it’s a daily challenge in our own lives.”
Among Latinos, 47 percent said the drought has had a major impact on their lives, the poll showed, with another 40 percent who said it’s had a minor impact.
California voters also strongly believe that the El Niño weather phenomenon forecasted to bring heavy rain this winter help the state’s water shortage and drought: 78 percent said El Niño will help, as opposed to 7 percent who said it will make no difference or make it worse, the poll showed.
Here’s a video:
The rest of the press release:
Voters are also increasingly less willing to pay higher water rates and bills to decrease water use, the poll showed.
When asked about a number of potential solutions to address the drought, 58 percent of voters said they would oppose increasing water rates and bills, as opposed to 38 percent who would favor it. In September 2014, voters opposed to raising water rates and bills, 51 to 44.
When asked to choose between two statements, 46 percent said they would be willing to pay higher water bills “to ensure a reliable, long-term water supply,” as opposed to 47 percent who said their water bills “are high enough” and are not willing to pay more to ensure the long-term water supply, the poll showed. In September 2014, the USC Dornsife/LA Times Poll showed 48 percent would pay more as opposed to 41 percent who believed their bills were high enough.
Voters gave high approval marks on water and drought issues to Gov. Jerry Brown – who in April issued an executive order calling for mandatory cuts in urban water use. Fifty percent of voters said they approved of the job being done by Brown on water and the drought, as opposed to 34 percent who said they disapprove. A year ago, the poll showed 39 percent of voters approved and 42 percent disapproved of the job Brown has done on water and the drought.
“Clearly as the state has put in the mandatory measures and implemented Gov. Brown’s policy, people are actually feeling this in their everyday lives. But California may be reaching the end of their rope in terms of the personal sacrifices they are making,” said Drew Lieberman, vice president of Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, part of the bipartisan team with Republican polling firm American Viewpoint that conducted the USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll.
Among the policy prescriptions most favored by voters: 95 percent favor both recycling more water and improving the state’s ability to capture storm water; 80 percent said investing in desalinating ocean water to make it suitable for household use; and 69 percent said build new dams and reservoirs.
But only 53 percent of voters said they favored requiring farmers and the agriculture industry to reduce water use. Voters were also unwilling to suspend environmental regulations that protect fish and wildlife to help address the drought, with 54 percent saying they oppose suspending environmental regulations and 42 percent saying they would favor it.
“Voters seem to have decided that they’re doing their share, there are other things that need to be done to impact the drought but it doesn’t need to affect the state’s other policy priorities,” Schnur said. “Voters are clearly concerned about the drought but tend to see it in isolation and not related to the state’s other policy challenges.”
When asked to choose between a pair of statements, 50 percent of voters said California should protect the environment, even if it hurts the water supply, as opposed to 34 percent who said the state should ensure the water supply even at the expense of the environment. In September 2014, 46 percent of voters said California should protect the environment and 37 percent said the state should ensure the water supply even if it harms the environment.
Californians were slightly opposed to allowing the government to impose fines of up to $10,000 for violations of water conservation rules, with 44 percent in favor and 49 percent opposed.
What (or who) is to blame for the drought?
When asked which factors were most to blame for California’s water supply problems, 90 percent said “not enough snow and rain,” followed by old delivery systems and not enough water storage (79%); Californians using too much water (78%); too much growth and development (72%); global climate change (69%); and environmental regulations (67%).
Sixty-five percent of voters said they blamed the agricultural industry, up from 54 percent a year ago, the poll showed. Support for requiring farmers to decrease water use jumped 16 percentage points over the September 2014 USC Dornsife/LA Times poll.
Latino voters were more likely than white voters to blame global climate change (76-65) and environmental regulations (76-62) for the state’s water supply problems.
“Given that a lot of these voters feel they’ve already made sacrifices, if other people had to take a further pinch they’d rather it be someone other than them. The agriculture industry is an easy victim to choose,” said David Kanevsky, research director of Republican polling firm American Viewpoint.
The latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Poll, the largest statewide survey of registered voters, was conducted Aug. 29 – Sept. 8 and includes a significant oversample of Latino voters as well as one of the most robust cell phone samples in the state. The full sample of 1,500 registered voters has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.
According to the Japan Meteorological Agency, “The monthly anomaly of the global average surface temperature in August 2015 (i.e. the average of the near-surface air temperature over land and the SST) was +0.45°C above the 1981-2010 average (+0.79°C above the 20th century average), and was the warmest since 1891. On a longer time scale, global average surface temperatures have risen at a rate of about 0.65°C per century.”
September is when the melt of the Arctic Sea Ice stops, and the re-freeze starts. We are probably not at the minimum yet, but the amount of melting is starting to level off so we can see where we are. The above graphic, made here (go and play with the interactive graph) shows the first ten years of ice freezing and remelting in the data set to use as a baseline for comparison, and the present year. Yes, there is much less sea ice on the northern end of the planet than usual.
This version of the graph shows the years with less ice, so far, than the present year. This includes the famous 2012 when the ice melted a lot lot more than usual, instead of merely a lot more. 2007 probably had less ice than this year will see, but we can’t be sure yet. 2011 and the present year are almost the same. Again, we’ll see but currently 2011 had a tiny bit less sea ice extent.
So, 2015 will end up being the second or third most ice free year on record. Keep in mind this is only surface, not volume. Still, surface is very important because it is part of a feedback system; the more surface ice the more reflection of sun’s energy back into space, the less surface covered with ice, the more the Arctic sea is warmed by the sun during the summer.
Marine biologists from the University of Queensland is looking at coral reefs in Hawaii and what they see is not good.
They used high resolution images to track coral bleaching and death. Recently coral reefs in Hawaii suffered their first known mass bleaching event, caused by unusually warm waters associated with the now famous “Blob” of warm sea water in the Pacific.
An overall warming trend (anthropogenic global warming) along with the additional effects of a growing El Niño seem to be causing this.
This phenomenon is happening now. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, chief scientist at Global Change Institute (Queensland) noted. “the coral bleaching we are uncovering in Hawaii is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we expect to unfold over the next few weeks. Ocean heat has not fully dissipated since last year’s bleaching event, adding stress to corals that haven’t fully recovered and which may not be strong enough to survive another bleaching event.”
The research team will continue to measure bleaching on the Hawaiian reefs for the remainder of the year. With increasingly warm waters in the region, this is a story to watch closely.
The Citi Global Perspectives and Solutions thingie, part of Citibank, has done a study that you can read here. It says that addressing global warming makes economic sense. So, when those science deniers are out there denying climate change they are also denying arithmetic. Shame on them.
Citi Global Perspectives & Solutions (GPS), a division within Citibank (America’s third-largest bank), recently published a report looking at the economic costs and benefits of a low-carbon future. The report considered two scenarios: “Inaction,” which involves continuing on a business-as-usual path, and Action scenario which involves transitioning to a low-carbon energy mix.
One of the most interesting findings in the report is that the investment costs for the two scenarios are almost identical. In fact, because of savings due to reduced fuel costs and increased energy efficiency, the Action scenario is actually a bit cheaper than the Inaction scenario.
Go read Dana’s writeup. There are flow charts and a pie diagram!
Not the book (which is good) but the thing. The storms, really.
I may have mentioned the pilot whales I saw in San Diego the other day. You’ve heard about changes in shark distributions, and odd fish being caught in unusual places, etc. This is all about changes in the Pacific as increased global warming affects ocean ecology. Inside Climate News has this:
Warmer North Pacific Is Staying Warmer, With Dramatic Impact on Marine Life
Ocean temperature fluctuations have slowed, a new study says, with an extended warm period in the N. Pacific causing a massive shift in marine life.
See the graphic above. We are experiencing yet another “oh wow” event in the tropics, which seem to be littered with cyclones. Check out the details at the Weather Underground tropical storm section.
We like to go to dry places, they are sunny, don’t smell like mildew, and generally make great destinations. But they are spots, fixed in space, on the landscape, and with climate change they are affected and can’t just get up and move. See: The Coolest Places We’re Losing to the Drought
Jeff Masters talks about Fred. This is the first fully formed hurricane since 1892 to hit the Cape Verde, and is likely the farthest east forming hurricane on record. By the time you read this Fred will be a big wet smear rather than a hurricane, but during its short life it set some interesting records.
1) A new poll looks at conservative and liberal views of science. The findings are not especially unexpected, but the details are interesting. The image above is from this infographic, and the details are given here.
Yes, the detail are quite interesting.
2) If you care, there is some information on what the 2016 GOP candidates stand on climate change.
Human caused climate change is changing the size and location of major climate zones, according to a new study.
Climate is complex, and a classic, widely used effort to wrangle that complexity into a sensible form is the Köppen classification system (and variants). We need not speak of the details here, but within this scheme there are five climate groups that include all of the possibilities for the Earth’s land surface. They are:
A: Tropical/megathermal climates
B: Dry (arid and semiarid) climates
C: Temperate/mesothermal climates
D: Continental/microthermal climates
E: Polar and alpine climates
This is sort of like a large scale version of the famous planting zone classification you use to determine when to plant your radishes or take in the last of the green tomatoes. The classifications are based on the idea that plants are indicators of the complex mix of factors that determine regional climate. Average temperatures matter, but high and low temperatures, when they occur (during the day and across the march of seasons) matter more, with key values such as frost mattering a lot. Average precipitation matters, but the distribution of precipitation across the year which might result in dry seasons matters a great deal. Ultimately, the local expression of global temperature, moisture, elevation, latitude, and the physical proximity to large bodies of water (most notably the oceans) and mountain ranges result in regional or local climate. The five classifications reflect zones that are mostly distributed across latitude (A on the Equator, E on the Poles) but that are also heavily influenced by altitude.
As humans add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere the climate changes. We therefore expect these major classifications of regional climate to change as well, both in their relative sizes and in their locations with respect to latitude and altitude.
The paper is Open Access so you can go read it yourself. It is very clearly written and interesting. Here, I’ll just give you the key conclusions.
The research uses several data sources to conduct the analysis. All of the data are gridded across the globe, but some grids don’t have their own data because they are in remote areas with little or no instrumentation across the study period. Some data sets interpolate values into these grid squares, and those that do use different methods. One major data set leaves those grid squares blank and treats them as missing data. By using all of the data sets, the researchers were able to avoid coming up with results that were influenced by specific interpolation methods. Most importantly, though, they discovered that using the missing data approach did not change results because the missing data squares are mostly in the most A-like of Group A climate areas or the most E-like of Group E climate areas. Group A climate zones are growing, so being in the middle of those zones does not influence the analysis. So, not knowing what was going on in the middle of the Congo Raiforest does not change anything. Group E climate zones are shrinking, but those areas that are deep wihtin those zones (at the poles, on top of Mount Everest, etc.) don’t matter either.
Group D is “continental” and includes places like Chicago, Seoul, Salt Lake City, Ottawa, Flagstaff, and Faribanks. It is a very large zone that transits places that have real winters and those that have whimpier winters. Even though Group D is huge and significant, it also acts a bit like an ecotone or transition between Group C (Seasonally dry or arid, like Los Angeles, Cape Town, Beirut) and Group E (Tundra, ice caps, etc.). For this reason Group D is divided along the 55th parallel.
There are some complexities in how the data change over time which I will skip here (see the original paper). The point is, the zones do change significantly, with anthropogenic global warming being the primary cause. There is nothing particularly surprising in the results, but details can be important. Most importantly, the study also uses modeling to look at both past and future changes, and predicts an acceleration in change.
This graphic shows changes in climate types over the period 1950 to 2003 using one of the data sets (the data they chose for most of the analysis).
Linear trends in areas of 5 major climate types for 1950–2003
Tropical areas are expanding in space, moving north, and moving up in elevation. Not a lot, but a little. Why not a lot? The study does not say but I’ll guess. The tropical heat and moisture associated with this climate group are rapidly dispersed by air and water circulation systems and become part of the rest of the climate system quickly.
Arid and semi-arid areas (Group B) expand dramatically in area, and also move north and up hill. Why to they expand so much? There are probably two reasons. One is that more heat means more evaporation as well as more holding potential for water in the air. So ground moisture is sucked into the air at a greater rate, and stays there longer. Another (but closely related) reason may be the clumping of moisture we see in certain emerging weather patterns. Clumping means more arid conditions, even if that clumped water all falls eventually, on average, where it might have fallen anyway. A given amount of water falling uniformly in time and space across a region may provide a non-arid climate zone. The same amount of water falling non-uniformly in space, or especially, time, may result in a semi-arid zone.
Arid, semi-arid, subtropical Group B expands at the expense of Group C, while Group C is busy moving north but not up in elevation. The norther parts of Group D (ie, much of Canada) diminishes in area and moves north and uphill.
Group E, the cold bits, decline in area, move north, and retreat uphill.
The most important thing in this graphic is probably the expansion of Group B, where we can and do grow some food but under somewhat difficult conditions, and the loss of Group C area. The breadbasket, it is shrinking.
The paper concludes,
… major Köppen climate types since 1950 have occurred worldwide and are almost entirely attributed to the observed anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. Model runs project accelerating anthropogenic-induced major climate type changes in the next decades. As the Köppen climate classification links the Earth’s climates with the qualitative features of the vegetation, results here indicate that observed climate changes might already be causing significant impacts on vegetation in areas where the major climate class has changed, and model projections imply increasing future impacts.
Sunday, I had the honor of interviewing John Abraham about current developments in climate change. It was Sunday morning so you were probably either sleeping or in church, but don’t worry, there’s a podcast!
Here’s a partial list of other Atheist Talk interviews I’ve done, in case you were looking to spend several hours listening to me asking interesting people questions.
I don’t care that the director or CEO of an advocacy organization concerned with poverty is an active academic. Indeed, my view of active academics is that many are largely incompetent in areas of life other than their specialized field. If that. So really, if you told me there is this great advocacy organization out there run by a well established active academic I’d figure you had that wrong, or I’d worry a little about the organization. On the other hand, everyone should care that university positions be given to active academics with credentials. So, when the University of Western Australia got paid off (apparently) to give Bjørn Lomborg a faculty position everyone looked at the UWA and said, “WUT?”
That was a situation up with which the members of that university community would not put, to coin a phrase, and the public outcry put a quick end to it. This is appropriate, because according to a new post by Stefan Rahmstorf at RealClimate, “… apart from one paper in 1996, Lomborg has never published anything in any field of science that was interesting or useful to other scientists, or even just worth the bother of contradicting in the scientific literature.”
I’ve talked about Lomborg here before. Here I noted,
There is currently a twitter argument happening, along with a bit of a blogging swarm, over a chimera of a remark made by John Stossle and Bjorn Lomborg. They made the claim that a million electric cars would have no benefit with resect to Carbon emissions. The crux of the argument is that there is a Carbon cost to manufacturing and running electric cars. When we manufacture anything, we emit Carbon, and when we make electricity to run the cars, we emit Carbon, etc. etc.
Lomborg is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But here I want to focus on one aspect of why he is wrong that applies generally to this sort of topic….
Stefan’s post looks in detail at two things (and in less detail at many other things). First, is the question of whether or not Lomborg is an actual practicing academic with a good publication record and all that. He is not. Stefan’s analysis is clear.
Second, is a more detailed look at Lomborg, sea level rise, Bangladesh, and all that. This is especially interesting because Stefan is one of the world’s leading experts on sea level rise. He has two peer reviewed papers on the “top ten most cited” on the Web of Science (which has well ove 40,000 sea level rise related papers), which are heavily cited. Stefan’s post is a must-read because of Stefan’s overview of sea level rise, aside from the stuff about Lomborg. Go read it.
So go read the post, learn about Bjørn Lomborg’s academic qualifications, how wrong he has been about sea level rise, and some other good stuff.
I suspect we are not going to see much more about Bjørn going forward.
Meanwhile, wildfires out west are really bad. A friend of mine drove way into the rocky mountains over the last few days and noted that for a long time he couldn’t even see any mountains the smoke was so bad. I suppose we’re lucky here in Minnesota. We get a LOT of smoke from fires in the Canadian Rockies and Alaska, but now most of the smoke is passing to our south.
Anyway, there are now tens of thousands of people fighting the fires, including many brought in from other regions, and even other countries. At the moment there are no fire fighters left. If you live out there in the chaparral and a fire starts near your house, you might not be able to get help. Check it out.
A quick update on sea ice melt. This time I decided to display, on a graph produced using the interactive tool made available by the NSIDC, the first 20 years for which there are data (to get the background) and the current year so far, of Arctic Sea ice extent:
The meme at the top of the post is available in higher resolution HERE if you want.
A new paper examines what is behind the ~2% of climate change related peer reviewed research that run contrary to widely accepted scientific consensus on climate change to see why those papers are wrong.
There is a scientific consensus that increasing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere causes surface warming, and that CO2 is a major greenhouse gas. This consensus is based on physics. We don’t need to observe the effects of human greenhouse gas pollution to know this. There is consensus that human burning of fossil fuel causes an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. We don’t need to observe this to know it, because we know how combustion works. But it is relatively simple to measure, and it has been measured, and it is true. There is consensus that the planet’s surface has warmed. This is expected from the physics and the fact that we are increasing atmospheric CO2, but it is also relatively easy to measure, it is measured, and it is true. There are varying levels of understanding the effects of this process, and varying degrees to which the effects of surface warming are thought to cause specific effects. One could probably characterize the scientific consensus as a widespread understanding that surface warming has had and will have a range of effects, with many of those effects being changes in weather patterns or regional climatology (how warm/cool/dry/wet a region generally is across he seasons) arising from a combination of “natural variability” (what would happen without greenhouse gas pollution) and anthropogenic global warming.
It is interesting, then, to see the results of various studies of scientific consensus related to climate change. Two kinds of studies have been done. One asks scientists what they think, the other reviews the scientific literature to see what the peer reviewed papers that address climate change say. In both cases we see a number between 90 (or, really, 95) and 100 percent agreement on the stuff in the paragraph above. It is not surprising that the vast majority of scientists, and the vast majority of research papers, have very similar things to say about climate change. This is not new science, and while climate is very complex, the basics of anthropogenic global warming are well understood. The results of empirical research closely match expectations derived from the physics. It all hangs together pretty well.
What is surprising is to see that 3-6% or so disagreement. Who are those scientists, why do they disagree, what do those papers say?
I would assume that since consensus research takes time, and often looks at several years worth of papers, that some of that non-consensus reflects older thinking and older research. Also, there are climate contrarians, including some scientists, who oppose the consensus for reasons not based on the science. That sort of denial presumably comes from the simple fact that some corporations or wealthy individuals will see reduced profits as we make the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels. So some of that non-consensus may be bought and paid for self interested maneuvering.
Rasmus Benestad, Dana Nuccitelli, Stephan Lewandowsky, Katherine Hayhoe, Hans Olav Hygen, Rob van Dorland, and John Cook, in “Learning from mistakes in climate research” (Theoretical and Applied Climatology) looks at the non-consensus peer reviewed literature.
The paper is here, and author Dana Nuccitelli has a writeup on the paper here. From the abstract:
Among papers stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), 97 % endorse AGW. What is happening with the 2 % of papers that reject AGW? We examine a selection of papers rejecting AGW. An analytical tool has been developed to replicate and test the results and methods used in these studies; our replication reveals a number of methodological flaws, and a pattern of common mistakes emerges that is not visible when looking at single isolated cases. Thus, real-life scientific disputes in some cases can be resolved, and we can learn from mistakes. A common denominator seems to be missing contextual information or ignoring information that does not fit the conclusions, be it other relevant work or related geophysical data. In many cases, shortcomings are due to insufficient model evaluation, leading to results that are not universally valid but rather are an artifact of a particular experimental setup. Other typical weaknesses include false dichotomies, inappropriate statistical methods, or basing conclusions on misconceived or incomplete physics. We also argue that science is never settled and that both mainstream and contrarian papers must be subject to sustained scrutiny. The merit of replication is highlighted and we discuss how the quality of the scientific literature may benefit from
replication.
The researchers found that cherry picking was the most common explanation for the non-consensus papers contrary results. In other words, it is not the case that a small number of paper simply found the physics, or some other aspect of, global warming to be different than other researchers found, or that they were looking at a part of the system that acts differently. Rather, these papers were wrong, and for a specific reason.
We found that many contrarian research papers omitted important contextual information or ignored key data that did not fit the research conclusions. For example, in the discussion of a 2011 paper by Humlum et al. in our supplementary material, we note,
The core of the analysis carried out by [Humlum et al.] involved wavelet-based curve-fitting, with a vague idea that the moon and solar cycles somehow can affect the Earth’s climate. The most severe problem with the paper, however, was that it had discarded a large fraction of data for the Holocene which did not fit their claims.
The authors attempted a replication of that particular research, and found that the model they used only worked for part of the underlying data. The data that were ignored by Humlum et al contradicted their findings.
Another problem identified by Benestad et al is the lack of a consistent sensible alternative explanation for their alleged findings. “…there is no cohesive, consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming. Some blame global warming on the sun, others on orbital cycles of other planets, others on ocean cycles, and so on. There is a 97% expert consensus on a cohesive theory that’s overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence, but the 2–3% of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map, even contradicting each other.”
The book also addresses Common Core Standards for literacy in science and technology.
.png){kind=link}